About Spelman's Independent Scholars

SIS an oral history research seminar in LEADS at Spelman College that provides students from across the disciplines with rich opportunities to learn from and bond with African American women elders of the South from diverse economic background. The elders have ranged in age from sixty-five to 103 and in achievement from earning a GED at the age of eighty and a Ph.D. at the age of twenty-four.

They were born in rural or urban communities in the South as the daughters of domestics, coal miners, sharecroppers, land-owning farmers, seamstresses, railroad pipe fitters, blacksmiths, cooks, pressers, teachers, preachers, and artisans. They became secretaries, nurses, teachers, realtors, caterers, entrepreneurs, preachers, college professors, and librarians.

 In interviews conducted by Young Scholars in SIS, the elders journeyed to different sites of  memory where forgotten, or untold, stories reside, waiting to be shared. Whether the site was a midwife’s birthing room in Mississippi, a one-room Rosenwald school in Tennessee, a coal miner’s kitchen in Kentucky, a tobacco farm in North Carolina, a bayou in Louisiana, or a slowly moving train in Warm Springs from which President Roosevelt waves, they remembered in color and in sound, sometimes chanting children’s rhymes and singing favorite hymns.

The collective life stories of elders in SIS, spanning eight decades, add textures of the human experience to American history and give witness to their generation’s belief in family, faith, hard work, integrity, and education as tested anchors in life.

Bonding with elders and research across disciplines that opens the lens of age help prepare Young Scholars in SIS for age-sensitive leadership and service in the twenty-first century.



                                                Gloria Wade Gayles

                                                Founding Director of Spelman’s Independent Scholars

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Stories From Our Elders

It was hailing, and Daddy came to the back door and said, “Baby, come help me get my boots off.” My daddy worked outdoors at a wood and fuel company and so, on the surface of his face and his arms, he looked to be about your color. I started pulling his boots off and before I knew it, I was trying to cover his feet with my dress. I said, “Mama, Daddy’s white. They’re going to take him away from us.” You know, back in those days, children didn’t see their parents’ naked feet.

Dr. Anna Harvin Grant
Jacksonville, Florida


When we left [the Bottom, a working class community in Atlanta], my father said, “Baby Doll, I want you to remember always to be nice to everybody you see because you don’t know whose two dollars put the shoes on your feet.” At that time, one or two dollars was the going rate for doctors. That philosophy has been a guide for me, and it was a gift from my father. It came from a man of Cajun background in Louisiana.

Mrs. Alice Holmes Washington
East Point, Georgia

I was cleaning this one room and I opened the drawer. A big roll of money was in the drawer. One hundred dollar bills! I slammed it shut. I walked around the room. I went back and looked at it. It was still there. I could see my grandmamma’s face telling me, “That’s not the way I raised you, Nadine.” That was somebody’s hard-earned money they left. Did I turn it in? Yes, because it was not mine.

Mrs. Nadine Bryant
Atlanta, Georgia

One of my fondest memories of growing up in Nashville with my siblings is going to birthday parties. I remember when I was seven and when I was eleven, my mother gave me a birthday party and, of course, she decided who would come to the party. We didn’t live close to other Black children because we lived in a White neighborhood, so it was a matter of children coming to visit. You know, we had to make special arrangements. It wasn’t easy to get to us, but living in the neighborhood had some advantages—you know, like deliveries and getting things that you needed. But it was isolated. It was lonely. We didn’t have any playmates on the block. The children didn’t play with us because we were Black.

Mrs. Julia Bond
Nashville, Tennessee


My father was a blacksmith, and his skills were very needed in the country because we did everything with horses and horses wore shoes. As a blacksmith, my father would shoe horses for everyone in the county. Black and white. People used wagons then, and wagons had iron rims on the wheels, and my father would repair the rims. My father died when I was twelve years old. He got the pneumonia from cleaning out wells—getting wet, you see. At the funeral, the minister said, “Would you people that owe Mr. Birch money, please pay his widow because he’s gone now.” We didn’t know folks hadn’t been half paying my father. Some said, “I’ll pay you Saturday” or “ I’ll pay you Friday”, and they didn’t get around to it. We didn’t have any idea who owed my father. Some of them were Black people, and some of them were White people.

Mrs. Emma DeGraffenreid
Talladega, Alabama

My father died in 1926, and the Depression came soon after then, so it was very hard, butmy mother saw us through. She took in sewing so that she could stay home and take careof all of us. We’d be sleeping and her machine would just be going. First, she had a foot pedal, and then when the electric machines came, she got an electric one. So, that’s how she made a living so that she could take care of the family. Her talent as a seamstress made money for her without her having to leave home. More White people came to the house than Black people for my mother to make things, you know.

Mrs. Lillie Harris
Chattanooga, Tennessee


[My grandmother] was a very enterprising woman. She would go into Griffin to attend workshops and seminars in order to become a professional midwife. She’d go down like in the morning and come back in the afternoon on the train. She was a professional midwife, and she delivered babies to Black women and White women as well. Most of the people would pay for my grandmother’s services with chickens and eggs. She took whatever they could give her, and she never turned anyone down.

Miss Annie Jewel Moore
Daytona Beach, Florida


Rosa [Parks] got on at one corner, and I would get on at the other. The bus driver would say, “Pack on back! Get on back!” I remember two bus drivers on that line who were humane. If these two drivers saw us coming, they would stand and wait and beckon. We would get on the bus and they’d say, “Don’t put your token in. You can ride to the end of the line free.” So, we got good seats. Then at the end of the line, we would drop in our bus token and ride all the way back across town. Some of the drivers were very nice like that, but others were very mean

Dr. Zelma Payne
Montgomery, Alabama


When [my grandmother] got to where I was jumping rope, she said, “Manuella”—she always dropped the E in my name and just called me Manuella—“Why in the world are you out here jumping rope when you should be inside on your knees?”I was supposed to be praying that I would see something. That’s what the church believed. When I went to revival that summer—after I had been praying with Grandma—I couldn’t lie, so I said to the church, “I haven’t seen anything.” The pastor said—and that was my father-- “Baby, you got to pray some more.” Let me tell you, Grandma came to our house every day at twelve o’clock for us to pray together. She would ask me, “Manuella, you see anything?”

Mrs. Emmanuella Spencer
New Orleans, Louisiana


And my next boyfriend was L.S. Steptoe. He was my real boyfriend, and one evening when we were talking, he told me he was going to marry a widow woman so that he could get her money. I told him to “kick his number” if that’s what he wanted. I didn’t like him any more after he told me he was going to marry somebody for money. Another boyfriend was Johnny Hampton. I didn’t want to marry Johnny him because he was just too jealous. Then I started seeing Johnny. Johnny Vick. He came by the house one day when nobody was home except me. When he came to the steps, he shouted, “You mighty happy.” I was inside sweeping and singing. I gave him some water. That was the beginning, and he never stopped coming to see me. We married in Mississippi. That was in December 21, l941. I was twenty-nine, and Johnny was about the same age.

Mrs. Earnestine Vick
Tinus, Louisiana

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